I've lost. I've been cheating left and right and I still managed to lose. The battle was pretty intense and I didn't build units fast enough to keep up with the enemy. I was quickly overwhelmed and all my extra gold was wasted, unspent.
I went and looked up a walkthrough to see how the level was meant to be played, and I was stunned by what I saw. The speed and precision of a skilled player is light years away from my half-assed fumbling. It was during this process that I learned what the "extreme" in Stronghold Crusader Extreme really meant.
Under the right conditions, this game allows you to control hundreds, or even thousands of troops at a time. The castle and siege mechanics of the base Stronghold game can't really cope with this. Instead of attacking walls with siege engines and ladders, you can just direct a swarm of melee units towards a fortification to take it down in minutes. When the armies really get going, it can be hard to even tell what's happening, the screen is so full of movement and chaos.
It inspired me to get extreme with the scenario builder. I created a large map, divided it in two parts with a thick wall, and then plopped down 50 unit spawners (set to produce the maximum number of units) on each side.
It took me a couple of hours, but I crashed the game. I thought it might happen right away, but it actually worked well for quite awhile. My best guess is that each side had about two or three thousand units active at once and the turnover was so, for lack of a better word, extreme, that tens of thousands of units were spawned and eventually killed. I'm not sure why it eventually broke. Maybe some kind of overflow error? Or maybe it was a miracle that it worked as long as it did.
My plan from here is to try it again, but as the other side. I wouldn't say that I used anything as sophisticated as strategy my first time round, but I'm not sure that matters. I enjoyed seeing the tiny pixelated hordes fight and die for my amusement.
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